So while this is on HN, I wanted to talk a bit about LXQt and desktop OSes in general.<p>Context: I'm one of the original leads on LXQt, and I initiated the merge of Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt into LXQt.<p>I've been using LXQt as my main desktop for several years now. I've kept up with what other desktops have been doing. I've been especially impressed by the efforts of the GNOME team, and especially disappointed with the clusterfuck KDE has become... but those are just details.<p>I feel like the Linux desktop is dead, and one of the worst examples of open source software right now.<p>Almost nobody actually collaborates on anything. Everybody wants to do their own thing and it leads to <i>developer fragmentation</i>. Every project is undermanned. LXQt is <i>especially</i> undermanned right now. The Cinnamon guys, last I heard, want to switch to Qt but don't have the developers to do it and would end up being a LXQt clone.<p>Nobody needs that many desktops, especially when nearly all of them are clones of each other in either GTK or Qt and 95% of the apps duplicate each others' functionality. The worst part is that, with more effort spent on cross-desktop specs and evangelism, software written "for" one desktop would work far better on others. But the XDG (cross desktop group) is in a pathetic state right now, with nobody reading the mailing list and no specs ever being worked on. Nobody cares, because very few people have enough context to see the need for it all.<p>Not to mention the sad state of UI toolkits right now. This isn't about GTK vs. Qt or anything... but you can't pick up your favourite language (Python, JS, whatever) and easily write cross-platform apps that work well on Linux. So what does everybody do? They ship a god damn copy of Chromium in their app. Bloody electron apps that, of course, respect zero accessibility settings, platform integration out of the window etc. Because that is the easiest thing to do.<p>It's pissing me off. Most people who care about their desktop have migrated or are migrating to OSX and the whole thing snowballs.<p>TLDR: No collaboration across desktops. Fragmentation with no cross desktop compatibility. 2016 was the year the Linux desktop died - won't anybody revive it?
How much of this is due to fragementatation/walled-garden mentalities, and how much due to issues with the C++/OOP-style API that most GUI/widget toolkits seem to share? With fragmentation as a consequence of everyone exploring their own solution to a genuine problem.<p>I'd say that the object-oriented style of GTK/wx/Qt/you name it is inherently hard to use cleanly in a language like lua - not that it can't be done but you constantly feel like "there must be a better way to do this". And then the kid next door shows you a HTML5 interface that just makes you go "wow", and the same again when he tells you he built it in 5 minutes. (The wow effect wears off quickly enough once you try such "arcane" things as keyboard shortcuts, or even getting a consistent TAB order half the time.)<p>It seems to me like everyone has realised that we need something better than writing python while thinking in C++, and everyone's experimenting with their own solution - hence why we have meta-object compilers and g-introspection and whatnot. Perhaps that's necessary because I don't think anyone has made a really good 21st century dynamic-language desktop application API yet that's almost as quick to work in as electron, but gets things right. Possibly with a sprinkle of functional programming and some kind of async thrown in.<p>You can't blame gnome 3 for not trying, but the amount of custom undocumented CSS you need to hack on to do something like picking an accent colour for the currently selected control make me think this is a really good learning example of how not to do it.
Since when I have switched to i3 window manger, I am totally enjoying it. It's minimal, fast, keyboard centric and perfect for computer with small screen size.<p><a href="https://i3wm.org/" rel="nofollow">https://i3wm.org/</a>
Any of you use a lightweight desktop environment like on high end expensive system. Why? Does it matter if you end up using lightweight desktop environment on a low end system and end up using resource intensive apps on top of it?